La Jolla, California
February 21, 1941Dear friends,
There is no doubt about the charm of the coast's increasing as one goes south - this is the best looking place of all. But all along from San Francisco to this place there is no true hard rock such as the Pilgrims stepped on, the kind of thing that spells rock to a New Englander. This is all half way between sand and clay and sandstone, and a good hard rain such as comes here often just melts the co-called stone away. I was in Laguna during the hardest rain I have seen yet, and a canyon came down into the sea. It was a small canyon, as far as I know only one house was washed away, but the amount of dark dirty brown mud in the water upset the fair ocean for three days. The sand of the beach was cut away near the mouth of the innocent stream to a depth of some dozen feet and two whirlpools formed one of which undermined the beach walk on one side of the stream, the other on its other side. Men stood in rows with poles to fish out of the black torrent anything they liked the looks of. I saw one man getting off with a truck load of planks, another coaxed in a big rubber ball. The bottles were many and the boys got them to smash on the rocks. It entertained the population for days and before that time was over approximately half of the sand had come back on the tide, though not under the walks. The beach had been a debris strewn mess, and the morning I left it was so spotless and so wide and untrodden that I risked not getting my packing done for the sake of walking a half mile down and back. The shore changes so, all the time. Big rocks which are out one day are buried by the next tide. At the next town a four story house which clambered up the cliff in the manner they build them here, said to have been 25 yards from the beach, was undermined and went down story by story.
Down here the cliffs are of the same kind and they take to arches and caverns. I shall investigate the La Jolla Caves when the surf goes down - there has been a big wind these last days as well as deluging showers. However I saw the occultation of Jupiter and Saturn between down-pours. The sand seems to condense to make roundish or oval stones, anywhere fom an inch to several feet in diameter, much harder than the cliff as a whole. These wash out and fall, but before then they stick out and one cliff where there are many has become the perching place, perhaps also the breeding place, of hundreds of black cormorants. I hope you all know those ungainly creatures, of evil disposition, also. They drive off the beautiful gulls, who also may not be altogether amiable. This cliff may be a hundred and fifty feet high for a guess, and I pine to take a picture of it, but it has no good light at any time of day not to mention that the only place to see it well is from the air in front of it. Now I don't mind going near the edge of a good solid New England rocky cliff, but I can just feel in my mind these things sliding away under me. It has evidently happend for there is a rescue rope every few feet all along in front of the whole town. The town has a splendid water front all unspoiled by any horrid little shacks such as seem peculiarly abundant and obnoxious in California.
The shore birds are abundant and so interesting - in size from the huge pelicans who preen their feathers with bills at least 8 or 10 inches long and whose wing spread is said to be 6 1/2 feet, down to little sandpipers whose feet run so fast they blur just like the wheels of a swift auto, in the days when they had spokes. I just adore these sandpipers, in flocks of twenty or even up to fifty, tripping confidently down after the out-going wave, grasping some dainty morsel and then just running back up the beach in front of the next wave. They are like a little wave themselves, making an edge to the water one, and with those twinkling little feet going faster than I could walk along the beach as they kept in front of me. I wanted so much to get them late in the afternoon when the light was right to reflect them in the sheen on the wet beach - but I never made it - I always waited just one instant too long, either for a few more birds to come into line or to get just a step nearer myself. There are big sandpiper-like birds, too, one I think is a dowitcher and has a straight bill which he bores into the sand with charming vigor. He let me get very close up and I tried some pictures, but he was a very monochrome color, like the beach and he may not stand out well. Here there is another even larger with a bill like a graceful bow in its downward curve, a Hudsonian curlew if I read my book aright. If there is a good picture day I shall try to find him again. The gulls are of several kinds and surprise me by looking different enough so that even I can tell them apart. There is a good book fortunately. The mocking birds are beginning to sing more and are in all the gardens, as are the linnets which look like purple finches though there are some tagged that latter name, too, slightly larger. There seem to be no English sparrows, though they were in San Francisco. Probably I just have not seen them - I can't think they are not here.
The spring is surely coming. There have been many flowers all along, but now there are more, flowering peaches of an exquisite bright shade, almonds that mean nuts, many hibiscus-es (pl. ?) of such lovely shades, camellias, whole fields of gladioli just coming into bloom, freesias in the gardens for borders, iris especially a lovely purple shade, of course more and more acacias, and I have hopes that the desert is blossoming. I have a date with the son of the house here to take me to see the Torrey Pines tomorrow if only it does not rain. This is a most picturesque species which grows in only one place on the main land and one place out on the islands, a restricted range of much interest. It has been found that they are in the La Brea pits however, which upsets the previous theories that the Indians brought them to the main lands.
I guess those La Brea pits have come since I wrote you a letter before. They are one of the best shows in Los Angeles, and the city can not claim it made them! They are awful asphalt pits, from twenty to fifty feet across for a guess, all framed around with neat brick walls lest anybody fall in. Not so many years ago a dog jumped in and his mistress after him to rescue him. They saved the girl with great difficulty, not the dog. They just are bottomless tar pits. From them have been fished out somehow a great number of huge fossils - the animals all fell in and the tar has preserved them. The restorations sit around the pits, a ground sloth whose feet are side down to the ground just as the upside-down sloth has to walk whenever he comes to earth, a short-nosed bear of most charming appearance, sabre-toothed tigers, mammoths, mastodons, elephants, all in abundance. With them are the bones of Indians, dogs, etc, for the mass seems to mix up and the bones are not in strata neatly laid down to tell their age. I have not yet seen the bones themselves where are in a museum I must go back to see. Also in those La Brea pits which we visited late in the afternoon was water on top of some of the tar, and in that were the noisiest toads I ever heard, egg-laying. There were also lovely red-winged blackbirds in the reeds. These did not mind the ghastly black bubbles which rose slowly to the top of the tar and broke, to leave rims that looked like the craters on the moon.
The Missions have been one of my chief joys. I like them just as well as I thought I should. The last one was San Luis Rey which I reached by a bus from Laguna down the coast to Oceanside, a nice ride of some thirty miles, and then a taxi ride of maybe two or three miles back over the ridge into the country where as always the fields stretch far toward the next ranges. The Padres founded their missions with seeing eyes. This one still had Franciscans there, quie a colony of them, and listen to what happened. One brother told me about his pet squirrel, I hear another asking if one out of sight had any soft, fine grass, "He won't eat anything else." What pet do you suppose that was? There were tame pheasants in a lovely inclosed [sic] garden, and a turtle, too. The flowers are of course always lovely around the missions. This one had the mother pepper tree of all in California, raised from some seeds which came from Peru (?) and still flourishing - not so awfully old to be sure when you think of the sequoias. The missions were founded along between 1769 and about 1800. Here they had about 3,000 converted Indians in residence, and only 2 white fathers holding them together instructing them so that they could make the churches and the arches of the cloisters, the houses hwere they lived all within the adobe walls which protected them from hostile tribes. It is an amazing picture that grows on one, and especially when the fathers are still a round, though I think there are no Indians, with one possible exception, which I may go to see if I decide to spend enough to get there and to Mt. Palomar where the great new lens will be. The observatories are already built. My chauffeur of the other day is all ready to take me! He was a kindly soul who landed me for lunch in a house where the program is "family style",all the guests around a big table to which are brought more food than you can imagine. It was splendidly cooked and father, mother and daughter (?) all hovered around to see this group of strangers eat. It was all neat and cordial and good.
This town is a beauty, with fine buildings and civic pride that keeps it all in order. I have been most interested in the new art center, for it is an artist town like Rockport and Provincetown. This exhibition is in a fine residence which they hope to buy. Any thing made by a local artist was accepted, in oils, watercolors, any form of sculpture, and down stairs in the basement on the hill slope (there is always a slope) are hooked rugs, and other more practical arts. The catalogue goes up to hundreds of things, including rooms with one-man shows which we should be delighted to have in Dwight Hall, and other sets of things from the art department of a swell private school where Caroline Mendum, M.H.C. 99, teaches. One artist has things which are priced from $300 - $500, C.C.Hayes, and I sure did wish we could have them in Dwight, subjects from France, from Japan and China (one exquisite thing of the Yang-tse at twilight with just one boat, like a Whistler in atmosphere), from the desert, just a few blades of rough grass on the edge of a dune, the Torrey pines with a quiet sunset over the ocean, oh, I stayed a long time and shall go back again. The best of this man's work was a portrait, not for sale, which seemed to me such a real woman. The woman in charge said Mr. Hayes has had many exhibitions all over the country. His brother is also in the show, a doctor, with just two or three things, but excellent. Of course there are many desert things, as well as mountains. I'd like to buy two or three!
This morning I have made my first trip out to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, some two or three miles up the coast, reached by the Institute bus through their courtesy. The man comes in for the mail three times daily and picks up employees who live in town and have no cars. I got introduced to a Dr. Fox who is most cordial. Also I find there Dr. Sumner who used to be at Woods Hole in days of old but I do not think he remembers me, a Dr. Johnson who has written a book on the animals of the Pacific Shore which I wish I had time to hover over, and I find Dr. Coe, retired from Yale, is here though he was not in this morning. I know him fairly well. I shall go out to read in their library as much as seems possible, for they have many, not all, the journals I wish to go over. The staff numbers maybe some forty, all told, larger than the Woods Hole Station, if you don't include the Atlantis crew. It has a fine feel about it. They have an Aquarium not unlike Fich [sic] Commission at Woods Hole, and a much better museum than any in Woods Hole. It is interesting and varied, and well set up. I envied it for Woods Hole. I have a date to be picked up again in front of the Post Office at eight on Monday morning.
There was a small marine lab. at Laguna Beach, run by Pomona College, and I saw it said open on the door so I went to it with pleasant anticipation, only to find it very chilly, in use this winter by a W.P.A. group making decorated aluminum bowls and such like.
My plans are pretty vague after two weeks here, ending March 5, but I shall try to intercept the desert flowers somewhere!
With my love to you all
Abby H. Turner